LOS ANGELES — Almost a decade has passed since actor Paul Giamatti was introduced to the world
as the hapless, neurotic but lovable wine aficionado in
Sideways.

Since then, he has played a president (John Adams) and a Federal Reserve chairman (Ben
Bernanke). This fall, he adds two more roles based on real-life characters to the list.

In
Parkland, a drama about the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he
plays Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas businessman who accidentally shot the famous 26-second film of
the event on his Super 8 camera.
Parkland opened yesterday.

In
12 Years a Slave, a grueling tale of a free black man sold into slavery, Giamatti is a
slave trader who puts the slaves on display and negotiates prices. The film, which critics consider
an Oscar contender, is scheduled to open in limited release on Oct. 18.

Giamatti, 46, spoke recently about playing a man wrestling with the decision to sell the JFK
footage and the difficulties of making ruthless slave trading seem acceptable.

Q: Your Parkland character, Abe Zapruder, fills in an information gap that most of us have. How
did you find out more about him?

A: I didn’t know anything about him, really. There’s footage of him — not a lot, but some of
that was very useful. I met his family. . . . You play a real person, and sometimes you meet the
family. That’s great. But in this instance, I felt like they had had enough people stamping around
their lives. So I didn’t want to get too all over them about stuff.

Q: At the beginning, we see him as a good man. What most worried you about getting the balance
right?

A: I didn’t want to make him too good, goody-goody good. I worried about making him too nice a
guy, but that is what he was.

One of the things I worried about the most is that he had an incredibly heavy accent. And I
wanted to get that, without overdoing it. He was a Ukrainian Jew raised in New York and he sounded
like it, which set him apart hugely from everyone else down there (in Dallas).

Q: Was Zapruder worried about the effect of the film?

A: It did really change his life. He seemed to know right away what it was going to do to his
life, which is amazing.

The whole thing of selling it was a real struggle for him. . . . He felt like, as a Jew, it is
going to look bad if he sold this thing to people. It was a really complicated decision for him and
he didn’t feel good about it. . . . But he wasn’t doing it to make a big bundle. It was kind of a
sense that “I need to get this out of my life, out of my family’s life, but be able to take care of
them because of the trauma everyone is going to have visited on them.”

Q: What is your role in 12 Years a Slave?

A: I play a real guy. No one knows much about him. He was named Theophilus Freeman, who was one
of the big slave traders in New Orleans in the 1850s.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays this guy who is kidnapped, and they sell him. They bring him to me, and I
process him through this slave market and sell him to Benedict Cumberbatch. So you see some of the
mechanics of selling slaves and the things they did to these people, like splitting a family.